Don’t Just Depend on Akismet

Many of use stopped using our anti-comment spam tools when Automattic, the WordPress folks, came out with their service, Akismet. It works well, it seems to learn how to defend our blogs against new types of spam comments, and has been stopping millions of spam for those using it.

The problem is, we have really put all of our eggs in one basket, and sometimes things don’t work as well as they should.

Even here at BloggingPro we still get a fair bit of comment spam, and really I shake my head, realizing that it is because when the service is down or not working decently we are left open to problems.

Load-wise we’ve been fine, but there has been some reduced effectiveness the past week, especially with the “nonsense spam” of random characters and domains.

But realistically, we should understand that no service can be 100%, and we should be prepared for such problems, interruptions in service, or just someone spamming in a way that Akismet does not defend from.

So don’t leave yourself open to spam, get some other tools to cover what Akismet misses. I think many people would suggest giving Bad Behavior 2 a try, but I can’t say for certain how good or bad it is, as I have never used it.

Comments

I have a fairly (ok, very) low volume blog in which Askimet nukes less than 5 spams a week, however Bad Behaviour blocks over 50 access attempts per week, so I’d say that BB does very well as a companion to Askimet 🙂

I moved to WordPress from Movable Type a year or so ago because I was sick of the poor tools I had available for dealing with spam on MT. I started out with Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behavior and was completely happy.

When WordPress 2.0 came out, I decided to avoid Askismet, because I knew SpamKarma2 worked, and I didn’t know if the two played well together. I also decided to ditch Bad Behavior because I’d heard rumors of it causing false positives.

It didn’t seem to make much difference, even now, with spam volumes up dramatically in recent weeks, no spam gets through. False positives are rare too.

I use all three. That is Bad Behavior, Akismet, and Spam Karma 2. I also disable comments after two weeks and disable pings after 7 days. This reduces spam big time. In fact I have not gotten a spam in over a month. Not a single one has gotten though. 🙂

I still stick with Akismet. I used Bad Behavior and Spam Karma before, they are great but, too great. It happened that some of the good visitors or websites cannot access by blog because blocked by Bad Behavior/Spam Karma.

Well in my case that does not seem to be a major issue. Only gotten a few emails about it in the past view months. And most of the time it was because they had spyware installed on their PC and did not even know it. 🙁

David,
I usually install both Akismet and Spam Karma 2 to my blogs. It’s a great combination and thus far it has gotten all comment spam. It is, however, not as reliable as trackback spam and I intend to try out Bad Behavior when appropriate.

LiewCF,
That sounds, well, weird. Do you mean that visitors can’t read the blog, or their comments get stuck in Spam Karma 2? If the latter then yes, that can happen depending on how severely you treat your spam (there are several levels) but I haven’t seen it yet, and I checked my caught spam very thoroughly during the first six months. We’re talking thousands of caught spam each week here so I didn’t want to just take the functionality for granted.